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Takahiko Masuda

Takahiko Masuda

My central objective is to understand the dialectical interaction between socio-cultural frameworks and psychological mechanisms. My research program has posed the following questions: Are basic psychological processes differentiated by culture? To what extent are basic psychological processes shaped by historical-cultural context? What kinds of cultural practices and socialization processes shape the individual mind?

To this end, I have focused on two cultural groups--the people of East Asia and the people of North America--and have been studying the systematic influence of East Asian and Euro-American worldviews on psychological mechanisms. Building on and testing this hypothesis, my research team has investigated both basic and complex cognitive processes, which we have categorized under the name of "Culture and Perception," "Culture and Judgment," "Culture and Interpersonal Relationships," "Culture and Emotion," and "Culture and Aesthetics," and "Culture and Language."

Primary Interests:

  • Causal Attribution
  • Culture and Ethnicity
  • Emotion, Mood, Affect
  • Social Cognition

Research Group or Laboratory:

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Journal Articles:

  • Ito, K., Masuda, T. & Li, M. -W. (2013). Agency and Facial Emotion Judgment in Context. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39, 763-776.
  • Kitayama, S., & Masuda, T. (1995). Reappraising cognitive appraisal from a cultural perspective. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 217-233.
  • Masuda, T., Akase, M., Radford, M. H. B., Wang, H. (2008). Jokyo yoin ga gankyu undo pattern ni oyobosu eikyo: Nihonjin to Seiyojin no syuken jyoho heno bunkasa no kikaku kenkyu [Cross-cultural research on the pattern of eye-movement: Comparing the level of concentration between Japanese and Western participants]. Japanese Journal of Psychology, 79, 35-43.
  • Masuda, T., Ellsworth, P. C., Mesquita, B., Leu, J., Tanida, S., & van de Veerdonk, E. (2008). Placing the face in context: Cultural differences in the perception of facial emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 365-381.
  • Masuda, T., Gonzalez, R. Kwan, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (2008). Culture and aesthetic preference: Comparing the attention to context of East Asians and European Americans. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1260-1275.
  • Masuda, T., & Kitayama, S. (2004). Perceived-induced constraint and attitude attribution in Japan and in the US: A case for cultural dependence of the correspondence bias. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 409-416.
  • Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R. E. (2006). Culture and change blindness. Cognitive Sciences, 30, 381-399.
  • Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R. E. (2001). Attending holistically vs. analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 922-934.
  • Masuda, T., Russell, M. J., Chen, Y. Y., Hioki, K., Caplan, J. B. (2013). N400 Incongruity Effect in an Episodic Memory Task Reveals Different Strategies for Handling Irrelevant Contextual Information for Japanese than European Canadians. Cognitive Neuroscience. DOI: abs/10.1080/17588928.2013.831819#tabModule
  • Masuda, T., Wang, H., Ishii, K., & Ito, K (2012). Do Surrounding Figures’ Emotions Affect the Judgment of Target Figure’s Emotion?: Comparing the Patterns of Attention between European-Canadians, Asian-Canadians, Asian International Students, and Japanese using Eye-trackers. Frontier in Integrative Neuroscience: The Impact of Emotion on Cognition. DOI: 10.3389/fnint.2012.00072
  • Miyamoto, Y., Nisbett, R. E., & Masuda, T. (2006). Culture and physical environment: Holistic versus analytic perceptual affordance. Psychological Science, 17, 113-119.
  • Nisbett, R. E., & Masuda, T. (2003). Culture and point of view. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 100, 11163-11175.
  • Wang, H., Masuda, T., Ito, K.,& Rashid, M. (2012). How Much Information? East Asian and North American Cultural Products and Information Search Performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38, 1539-1551.
  • Yuki, M., Maddux, W. W., & Masuda, T. (2007). Are the windows to the soul the same in the East and West? Cultural differences in using the eyes and mouth as cues to recognize emotions in Japan and the United States. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 303-311.

Other Publications:

  • Kitayama, S., & Masuda, T. (1997). Shakaitekininshiki no bunkabaikai model. [Culture-mediated model of social cognition]. In K. Kashiwagi, S. Kitayama, & H. Azuma (Eds.), Bunkashinrigaku: Riron to Jissho [Cultural psychology: Theories and research] (pp. 109-127). Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppan.
  • Nisbett, R. E., & Masuda, T. (2006). Culture and point of view. In R. Viale, D. Andler, & L. Hirschfeld (Eds.), Biological and cultural bases of human inference (pp. 49-70). Mahwah, New Jersey: Laurence Erlbaum Associates.

Courses Taught:

  • Advanced Social and Cultural Psychology II
  • Advanced Topics in Psychology II: Research Methods in Cultural Psychology
  • Advanced Topics in Psychology II: Theories and Research in Cultural Psychology
  • Culture and Cognition
  • Culture and the Mind: Understanding Cultural Variations in Mentalities and Artworks between Japan and Canada
  • Individual and Social Behavior
  • Personality
  • Psychological Perspectives on Culture and Ethnicity
  • Social Cognition
  • Social Psychology

Takahiko Masuda
Department of Psychology
University of Alberta
P-355, Biological Sciences
Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E9
Canada

  • Phone: (780) 492-7861
  • Fax: (780) 492-1768

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